About Deploying Oracle Grid Infrastructure Using Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance

Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance (RHP) is a software lifecycle management method for provisioning and maintaining Oracle homes. RHP enables mass deployment and maintenance of standard operating environments for databases, clusters, and user-defined software types.

Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance enables you to install clusters, and provision, patch, scale, and upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Oracle Restart, and Oracle Database homes. The supported versions are 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, and 18c. You can also provision applications and middleware using Rapid Home Provisioning.

Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance is a service in Oracle Grid Infrastructure that you can use in either of the following modes:

Central Rapid Home Provisioning Server

The Rapid Home Provisioning Server stores and manages standardized images, called gold images. Gold images can be deployed to any number of nodes across the data center. You can create new clusters and databases on the deployed homes and can use them to patch, upgrade, and scale existing installations.
The Rapid Home Provisioning Server can manage the following types of installations:
- Software homes on the cluster hosting the Rapid Home Provisioning Server itself.
- Rapid Home Provisioning Clients running Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2) and 18c.
- Installations running Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11g Release 2 (11.2) and 12c Release 1 (12.1).
- Installations running without Oracle Grid Infrastructure.
The Rapid Home Provisioning Server can provision new installations and can manage existing installations without requiring any changes to the existing installations. The Rapid Home Provisioning Server can automatically share gold images among peer servers to support enterprises with geographically distributed data centers.
Rapid Home Provisioning Client

The Rapid Home Provisioning Client can be managed from the Rapid Home Provisioning Server, or directly by executing commands on the client itself. The Rapid Home Provisioning Client is a service built into the Oracle Grid Infrastructure and is available in Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2) and later releases. The Rapid Home Provisioning Client can retrieve gold images from the Rapid Home Provisioning Server, upload new images based on the policy, and apply maintenance operations to itself.

Rapid Home Provisioning and Maintenance

Deploying Oracle software using Rapid Home Provisioning has the following advantages:

Ensures standardization and enables high degrees of automation with gold images and managed lineage of deployed software.
Minimizes downtime by deploying new homes as images (called gold images) out-of-place, without disrupting active databases or clusters.
Simplifies maintenance by providing automatons which are invoked with a simple, consistent API across database versions and deployment models.
Reduces maintenance risk with built-in validations and a “dry run” mode to test the operations.
Enables you to resume or restart the commands in the event of an unforeseen issue, reducing the risk of maintenance operations.
Minimizes and often eliminates the impact of patching and upgrades, with features that include:
- Zero-downtime database upgrade with fully automated upgrade, executed entirely within the deployment without requiring any extra nodes or external storage.
- Adaptive management of database sessions and OJVM during rolling patching.
- Options for management of consolidated deployments.
The deployment and maintenance operations enable customizations to include environment-specific actions into the automated workflow.